Today, I wanna talk about something I’ve been messing around with lately – Massey Ratings. Now, I stumbled upon this whole thing while I was trying to figure out a better way to rank college football teams. You know, the usual rankings always seemed a bit off to me, and I wanted something a bit more, uh, logical, I guess.
So, I started digging around the internet, and boom, I found this Massey Ratings thing. Apparently, this guy Massey, who’s a math whiz or something, came up with this system back in the 90s when he was still a student. Smart dude. The idea is pretty simple, really. It’s all about using the score differences in games to figure out how good teams are. Like, if Team A beats Team B by 10 points, then Team A’s rating should be 10 points higher than Team B’s. Makes sense, right?
First, I got into the math part of it. They said it is something called “least squares solution” – man, that sounds complicated. But once I dug in, it wasn’t that scary. It’s basically just a bunch of equations where you have the ratings of two teams and the score difference, and you try to make them all fit together as nicely as possible. They showed this equation: ri – rj = y. Here, ri is the rating for one team, rj is for another, and y is the score difference. Seemed pretty straightforward to me.
I spent a good chunk of time playing around with these equations, plugging in scores from past games. There’s a bit of trial and error involved. The cool thing I found was that you could include all sorts of teams – not just the big-name schools, but even the smaller ones. It gave a more complete picture.
Then, I tried to see how these Massey Ratings compared to the “official” rankings, like the ones they use for the playoffs and stuff. The results were kinda cool, actually! The consensus and Massey Ratings were pretty similar, which made me feel like I was onto something good. There were some differences here and there, but overall, it felt like a more solid way to rank teams. No crazy results, no weird jumps up or down.
I also found out this Massey guy is actually a partner in some consulting firm and he’s been doing this for all kinds of sports, not just football. It seems like he is really into this stuff. I guess when you’re good at something, you stick with it.
So, what’s the big takeaway from all this? Well, for me, it was a fun little project that showed me a different way to look at sports rankings. These Massey Ratings, they’re not perfect, but they make a lot of sense. It’s like, instead of just some guys deciding who’s good and who’s not, you’ve got this system that’s based on actual game results. It’s more objective, I think. It was a great experiment, and now I’m even thinking about how I could tweak it further. Maybe add some more factors, or adjust the weights. Who knows! Anyway, that’s my Massey Ratings adventure. I might write more about it later if I come up with anything interesting. I had fun with it.
